Negative Seo by posting exerpts of your site

[seoskunk]

Just come across some negative seo (yes it does exist) where by exerts of your content is scraped and posted on various urls without backlinks, my response was swift to this filed a dmca and spam reports.

The site targeted by neg seo has dropped out of the index for main keyword. Difficult with so many updates to discover if this is the real cause or if its something else but I guess you have to cover all bases.

Just wanted to give you guys a heads up on this technique.

[Kelowna]

with no links back to you then it is not negative seo at all. they probably got dropped by Google for lousy copied content

[netmeg]

Yea this is not what I would consider to be negative SEO. This sounds like scraping.

[martinibuster]

Virtually any site ranking in any position on any search engine has been crawled and has had excerpts published. It happens so often it's normal and to be expected.

[Clay_More]

I ran a blog for a bit where the content was nothing but scraped content from other sources. It would have been interesting if the original sources posted something significant, but it was mostly just junk they thought might have some significance to their market.

It's a concept I will revisit just because it has interesting aspects.

[lucy24]

It would have been interesting if
<snip>
because it has interesting aspects.

May you live in interesting times.

[glakes]

There are a few very large websites that are comprised of excerpts scraped throughout the web. Visit Google webmaster help forum to find the main thieves and block them in your htaccess and add them to your disavow file. Yes, the biggest thieves do link back and their whole process is automated and that allows for the exponential growth of their websites.

With millions upon millions of pages made of scraped content, and many people complaining in the webmaster help forum, it would be helpful if Google actually employed some moderators to pass this information onto someone in Google to take action. It's as if Google has left policing the web to individuals. Such policing would not be needed if Google rid their index of these worthless scraper websites.

[seoskunk]

I maybe wrong on this but associating your content with penalised websites I think is a form of black hat seo. In this case we will see soon enough, but to plagiarize content on enough sites is in effect rendering the content worthless and therefore the site dives.

[netmeg]

I maybe wrong on this but associating your content with penalised websites I think is a form of black hat seo

Maybe, but parts of my sites have shown up on these types of sites for years without any ill effect. They're not competitors trying to knock me out, they're just bottom feeders trying to scrape the entire web for whatever pennies they can pick up. I am reasonably sure Google can tell I'm not "associated" with them. YMMV.

[Clay_More]

May you live in interesting times.

You apparently do not spend much time looking at real estate agent blogs, otherwise you'd know exactly what I was saying. ;)

The wind always at my back helps to make the interesting times bearable.

[bhartzer]

I agree with netmeg, content (or even partial content) scraped has typically been done for years now without any problems.

[seoskunk]

May you live in interesting times

I've had that said to me before and mistook it as a nice thing to say but its actually a Chinese curse. Bit like the scraping of this website :)

[philgames]

If your site gets ripped by the churn and burn hacker spammers and sentences from every page of your site get posted repeatably on thousands of sites with potentially more authority than yours (iv seen pr6 news sites get hacked and rank for random things on first page due to news results and then redirect traffic to counterfeit sites) say goodbye to your ranking if your a small site. It does devalue your content and cause your site sometimes to be omitted from the search results.

Dmca thousands and thousands of hacked pages which grows day by day = impossible
Plus excerpts probably fall under "fair usage annoyingly too.

I think that eventually if tens of thousands of pages some super spammy and some not have same content that it can cause the google algo to not be able to work out which version of the content to rank either finding a legit version or a non spam version and because there are plenty of other results it choices not to rank the content at all... So omit or disappear said content.

[seoskunk]

Thanks Philgames best I nip it in the bud now before it spirals out of control. Reproducing your content on other sites is extremely damaging if not pegged in. I never believe this "Oh there just scraper sites" nonsense, DMCA them in my opinion and if you have time report them as well. Site in question is still awaiting response from G.

[Clay_More]

@seoskunk,

I'm sure lucy24 just felt a Chinese curse was appropriate. I can understand that. If I had a significant amount of time invested in rodent blogging, I'd be throwing curses left and right for anyone that may suggest some blogs have more value than others.

I don't take it personally, hopefully she'll realize people have to explore different paths and can't necessarily follow her exact version of what the internet should be.

Or maybe not.

[samwest]

May you live in interesting times

The literal translation of the Chinese curse applies better: "better to live as a dog in an era of peace than a man in times of war."

[Broadway]

I think you are naive to think that over the long haul, and when taken to the extreme, that this type of activity has no effect on your rankings.

I think without question that google looses the ability to keep track of who the original source was.

Adding to the confusion is the case where the stolen content is revised, and you also revise your content (to retain freshness).

Over the course of years, this seems to be a no-win situation for high-ranking evergreen content. Its just what happens. The solution is a complete rewrite.